Category: Kentucky

Jorts on Fire

~ meh ~ Leave a comment

Things just got serious.

(above photo courtesy of my phone in a dark bar, 3 seconds after the final shot)

Kentucky is on its way to the Elite Eight.

There is a player on the UK team that everyone calls Jorts (because that is what he wears around campus).  He is the only senior on the team, and this year they changed Senior Day to Jorts Day.  Everybody wore jorts.  For reals.

Anyway, yesterday, Jorts had an amazing game and Kentucky ousted #1 seed Ohio State.  It.  Was.  Awesome.

UNC v. UK tomorrow.

GO CATS.

…and then my heart with pleasure fills

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After a few years away from snow and cold winter misery, it’s easy to forget how wonderful the arrival of Spring is.

And the daffodils.  They are EVERYWHERE, like a weed…apparently this is normal, but I have never seen so many bloom en masse on their own before in my life.

In the East daffodils are a sign of prosperity and luck.  If a daffodil blooms on the Chinese New Year it is said to bring wealth and good fortune throughout the rest of year…so this should be a good one for us.  But, their bulbs are poisonous and are often mistaken for onions, so watch out.  Unfortunately every time I see them I think of the mean daffodils from Alice in Wonderland and have a weird kind of aversion to them.

But I’d take daffodils over black ice any day.  Even the mean ones.

photo via

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

~William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Casa Creamsicle

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After much thought, we have decided to stay in the house that we are currently renting and not buy here in Kentucky.

Now time to finish unpacking, get rid of the boxes, and make this previous bachelor pad somewhere liveable.  (The house was kind of trashed when we moved in and our landlord lives in DC, so he has no problem at all with us fixing it up.)

First step: paint.

All of the walls in our house are kind of a brownish-gray color, except for the biggest room, the living room, which is dark blue.  Wildcat blue.

We are not repainting the blue room.  Too much work.  Which means we are going to have to work with the blue…starting with the dining room.  The dining room opens up into the living room, so our goal was twofold: find a color that brightened up the dining room (inside the house can get a little dark) and also went well with the blue.

Off to Home Depot…multiple times.  After innumerable light blue and red and green and yellow and off-white swatches, and a minor melt-down by me in the store (“I can’t do this anymore, I just don’t care, let’s just leave it”), we walked out with a can of…orange paint.

“Vintage Orange.”  Yeah.  I don’t know.

Final result.  Before:

After:

Woah.  Definitely brighter.  Reminds me of…a creamsicle (or, for those of you who were there, the far wall of my bedroom in San Diego.)  We’ll see.

UPDATE: Furniture has been moved back in (we need a new kitchen table and that dresser is going back to the landlord next time he’s in town, but it’s a start.)

Methrat

~ meh ~ 7 Comments

There is a big tree in the corner of our yard.

Last night Spike was going ballistic under the tree and wouldn’t come out, so we guessed he had cornered some animal under there.  I started to freak out because possums and raccoons are rabid.  And because Paul was in his boxers, I was sent outside with the head lamp to deal.

I stood next to the tree yelling Spikes name, but that did nothing.  At first glance I couldn’t see anything.  So I got down on my knees and shone the light between the branches and saw…this:


Its face was too short to be a possum, but it was almost the size of Spike (the above illustration is drawn to scale).  It was like a gigantic, hideous, deformed rat.   It was…So. Ugly.

I let out some noise between a gag and a shriek and jumped up to find a big stick/yell at Paul that he’d better get out there.  As I ran towards the corner of the yard to get a stick, Spike stopped barking and that creature started making these god awful, other-wordly screeching noises.  I started screaming “OH MY GOD HE’S EATING IT!  SPIKE IS EATING THAT THING!”

About 30 seconds later, as Paul emerged from the house shirtless in jeans with a broom, Spike came trotting out from behind the tree, like nothing had happened.  We searched him for bite marks or blood or saliva, but didn’t find anything and promptly threw him in the bathtub.  So.  Gross.  God knows what our neighbors thought was going on.

We still don’t know what that was (Paul’s mom said it had to be a possum, maybe a baby one), and this morning we went and looked outside and there was no carcass there, which means it is still roaming free.  Now every time I hear a bump in the night I think it’s that thing.  That rat on roids.  Or more likey…meth.

In the doghouse

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Somebody has a new home.  Though the exterior paint job isn’t complete, Paul built this palace for Spike during his Spring Break, complete with carpeted interior.

Unfortunately a storm’s coming tonight.

Batten down the hatches.

Update: External doghouse paint complete.  And fierce.

And the insides stayed dry through the storm.  Success.

The Haps

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For those of you who are unaware (most likely all of you…I don’t think this blog has many local followers), it has been a big few days at Governor Brashear’s office here in Kentucky.  A sit-in at the Governor’s office with local activists, authors, teachers, and scholars began on Thursday.  It coincided with the I Love Mountains march yesterday bringing together thousands of people from across the state in a push to end Mountain Top Removal (MTR).

Before coming to Kentucky I had heard of MTR but knew very little about it.  Give yourself 24 hours here and the “Friends of Coal” license plates and “I heart Coal” bumper stickers littering the roads of Kentucky make clear the fact that coal companies have quite a wide reach in these here parts.  While it may seem that these happenings in Appalachia have little to do with you, remember that over half of the electricity produced in the country comes from coal.  The world is small, the US even smaller.  You may be more connected than you think.